Al Davis: Take no prisoners

[AL_Royalty 489]

A Brash Style and Power Plays Allowed Davis to Wrest Control

 

Published: October 10, 2011

 

When F. Wayne Valley hired Al Davis to coach the Oakland Raiders in 1963, he could not have imagined that Davis would one day shrewdly maneuver him out as the principal owner.

 

Davis, who died on Saturday, was the receivers coach of the San Diego Chargers at the time. When Valley was asked what he saw in Davis, he said: “Because everybody hates him. Al Davis wants to win and he’ll do anything to win. And after losing all those games, I wanted a win, any way I could.”

 

Davis turned a dreadful American Football League team that was 9-33 from its inception in 1960 into one with a 23-16-3 record in his three seasons as the coach. He left in 1966 for a brief stint as the A.F.L. commissioner.

 

When he returned later that year to the Raiders, it was not as the coach. Davis had something much grander in mind. Now he was a general partner, head of football operations and a part-owner after paying a reported $18,000 for 10 percent of the team. In 1969, he hired John Madden as the coach.

 

That would be one step in Davis’s climb to controlling the Raiders.

 

He got a piece of the team on the cheap and a managerial grip on the franchise. Still, Davis was a football guy without the wealth of other A.F.L. owners like Lamar Hunt (oil and real estate), Barron Hilton (hotels) and Bud Adams (oil). Nor was he as rich as Valley, a homebuilder, or Edward W. McGah, a developer, another one of the eight founding Raiders partners.

 

Valley rightly saw a rare commodity in Davis, but it did not ensure a smooth relationship. They did not get along. Madden said of Davis on Monday on KCBS Radio: “He wasn’t a pushover for anyone. And he did like the battle. He did enjoy arguing.”

 

In 1972, Davis staged what looked like a coup d’état. With Valley at the Summer Olympics in Munich, Davis drew up a contract that he and McGah had signed to pay Davis $100,000 for 20 years and further consolidate his power as managing general partner. Once aware of it, Valley sued to nullify it.

 

But Valley lost the suit, and in 1976, he sold out to Davis, said Jack Brooks, a former Raiders partner.

 

“His relationship with Valley wasn’t very good,” Brooks said Monday from San Francisco.

 

Peter Richmond, who wrote a book about the Raiders of the ’70s, said in a telephone interview on Monday: “Al became dictator and emperor. Emperors become emperors for many reasons, and one is the hunger for power. But Al’s hunger for power wasn’t to grind everybody’s face in the dirt. It became a thing where he could say, ‘I can build an empire and dominate it if I do well.’ ”

 

By 2003, McGah had been dead for two decades and his family held his 31 percent of the team. McGah’s daughter-in-law and great-grandson sued to dismiss Davis as the managing general partner because he was denying them full access to the team’s financial records. They said that Davis and the company he created to run the team “conducted themselves as if they were the sole owners of the Raiders.”

 

Here was an unusual turn of events: Davis was being sued by the family of the man who ushered him into the seat of total power with the Raiders. But the lawsuit ended well for Davis. After it was settled, Davis reportedly acquired the McGah stake, raising his share of the team to an estimated 67 percent.

 

At the time, Valley’s son, Mike, saw something familiar in the McGah family’s battle against Davis.

 

“The power that is being exercised against the McGahs today is the same power that was used to pry my dad away from the team,” Mike Valley told The Contra Costa Times. “I wish them all the luck in the world.”

 

A couple years later, Brooks said he sold his stake to Davis, not to settle a feud, but to plan his estate.

 

He did not divulge how much of the team he owned, or what Davis paid for it.

 

“We got along fine,” Brooks said. “We were good friends, and Al never asked to buy me out.”

 

He added: “Al’s irreplaceable. When I met him before we hired him as coach, I said, ‘This guy’s different from anybody else we talked to before.’ ”

 

By 2007, Davis had been associated with the Raiders for 44 years. He decided to get some cash flow out of his holdings and sold 20 percent of his Raiders to three investors for $150 million.

 

Source: Richard Sandomir, N.Y. Times

Edited October 11, 2011 by B-isforBowe